The first news that we, the American people, must contrive to get into the White House about ourselves is that we do not want to be improved, and that we do not like an improving tone in our government. We want to be expressed the way McAdoos express us. We want a government that expresses our faith in one another, in what we are doing, and in ourselves, and in the world.
We are singing over here on this continent. We would not all of us put it in just this way. But our singing is the main thing we can do, and a government that is trying to improve us feebly, that is looking askance at us and looking askance at our money, and at our labour, and that does not believe in us and join in with us in our singing does not know what we are like.
Our next national business in America is to get the real news over to the President of what we are like.
It is news that we want in the White House. A missionary in the White House, be he ever so humble, will not do.
Mr. Roosevelt, himself, with the word Duty on every milepost as he whirled past, with suggestions of things for other people to do buzzing like bees about his head, acquired his tremendous and incredible power with us as a people because, in spite of his violent way of breaking out into a missionary every morning and every evening when he talked, it was not his talking but his singing that made him powerful—his singing, or doing things as if he believed in people, his I wills and I won'ts, his assuming every day, his acting every day, as if American men were men. He sang his way roughly, hoarsely, even a little comically at times into the hearts of people, stirred up in the nation a mighty heat, put a great crackling fire under it, put two great parties into the pot, boiled them, drew off all that was good in them, and at last, to-day, as I write (February 1913), the prospect of a good square meal in the White House (with some one else to say grace) is before the people.
The people are waiting to sit down once more in the White House and refresh themselves.
At least, the soup course is on the table.
Who did it, please? Who bullied the cook and got everybody ready?
Theodore Roosevelt, singing a little roughly, possibly hurrahing "I will, I will, I won't, I won't," and acting as if he believed in the world.
Bryan in the village of Chicago sitting by at a reporter's table saw him doing it.